LTM Email Alert "Maintenance Mode"

My organization has email alerting setup on our LTMs to alerts on just about everything. During a maintenance period, the alerts get quite noisy as nodes are up and down. To try and work around this, I tried stopping the alert service which we were performing maintenance and then restarted it after we were done. The problem was that once the service was started it just sent all the emails for alerts that queued up. Is there a way to clear the queue for email alerts prior to starting the alertd service? Is there a better way to suspend email alerts during maintenance periods?